Ashmolean The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin’s teaching collection at Oxford

The drawing shows the Piazza delle Erbe in Verona, looking along the square to the north-west. Two houses with frescoed facades (nos 21-3 and 27) can be seen on the left, as well as the late-medieval Torre del Gardello. At the end of the piazza is the baroque Palazzo Maffei, and immediately to its right the frescoed facade of the Case Mazzanti. Umbrellas shade a few market stalls to the left of the square; in front of the Palazzo Maffei is the Corinthian Colonna di San Marco (its statue of Saint Mark already removed); to the right is the Fontana di Madonna Verona; the canopy supported by four columns is the Berlina.

Ruskin dated the drawing to 1841 in his Verona catalogue (no. 42 = XIX.457), and Cook and Wedderburn called it 'an earlier drawing, in Ruskin's Proutesque manner' (XXI.31 n. 2; XXXVIII, no. 2024). Taylor proposes 19 May 1841 as the date, quoting Ruskin's diary entry for that day: 'Sketching all day under a huge umbrella beside a cheese stall in the great sq[uare].'

The drawing was first catalogued in the Oxford collections in 1872, as no. 61 in the Reference Series, where it was placed alongside drawings of buildings and sculptures in Abbeville, Verona and Venice. He had already displayed it in his Verona exhibition, where he described it as 'showing general effect and pretty grouping of the later Veronese buildings'. He exhibited it again in his 1878 Turner exhibition, noting that 'The exhibition of David Roberts' Syrian sketches put me into a phase of grey washed work with lights of lemon yellow, which lasted till the winter of 1841'; this drawing was one example of 'satisfactory memoranda made at this time' (no. 24.R.(k) = XIII.507).

Ruskin later had Randal draw the same scene; an abandoned study, carried out in 1884, is now in the collection of the Guild of Saint George (R.611; Morley, Appendix, p. 162).